Forum:Tolkien Influences

In short, my question is, how much do we want to include Tolkien's possible influences as seperate articles? For instance, should we create an article on the Celts, due to Tolkien's remark about the Silmarillion having a Celtic style, and the similarities in several Silm names and Celtic names (such as Huan)? Slightly less direct or obvious, should we create an article on Armageddon, because of its similarities to the Last Battle? The only non-Tolkien article that I know of already is Anglo-Saxon/Old English, which is highly related to Tolkien. But how far down on the scale of relativity do we want to go? Of course the possible articles I listed would be Tolkien-based in content, or at least about their connection to Tolkien, but do they deserve their own articles? I had some other comments and thoughts on the matter, but I've forgotten them now, and will try and remember. --Narfil Palùrfalas 21:33, 18 September 2006 (EDT)

Great question. I started compiling a list at J.R.R. Tolkien's inspirations but there was just too many. Maybe what we can end up doing is using that page for a portal to the pages which list the specific inspirations. The tricky part comes with inspirations such as "the second tree from the left in Tolkien's backyard" as they become difficult to name. Although I suppose an article on Trees would suffice. I'm not worrying too much about having the separate articles as much as I am containing them in the "Inspiration" group. We definitely need a category to add all the articles to. In the end our best bet is to add everything to that inspirations page and create new articles for the more popular inspirations. On top of this the inspirations should most definitely be listed under their related in-Middle-earth article. Sorry for being so undecided, let's just work with the major inspirations for now and continue going down the list, if we get to a point where we feel the content doesn't justify an article then we can stop. Luckily with the wiki software anything we can do can be easily undone/moved/etc. Thanks for bringing this up. Oh and definitely check out Ardamir's list of inspirations. --Hyarion 23:46, 18 September 2006 (EDT)